Page 191 - tess-of-the-durbervilles

in a loud whisper; then woke her fellow-milkmaids. By the
time that Tess was dressed Clare was downstairs and out in
the humid air. The remaining maids and the dairyman usu-
ally gave themselves another turn on the pillow, and did not
appear till a quarter of an hour later.
The gray half-tones of daybreak are not the gray half-
tones of the day’s close, though the degree of their shade
may be the same. In the twilight of the morning, light seems
active, darkness passive; in the twilight of evening it is the
darkness which is active and crescent, and the light which
is the drowsy reverse.
Being so often—possibly not always by chance—the first
two persons to get up at the dairy-house, they seemed to
themselves the first persons up of all the world. In these ear-
ly days of her residence here Tess did not skim, but went
out of doors at once after rising, where he was generally
awaiting her. The spectral, half-compounded, aqueous light
which pervaded the open mead impressed them with a feel-
ing of isolation, as if they were Adam and Eve. At this dim
inceptive stage of the day Tess seemed to Clare to exhibit a
dignified largeness both of disposition and physique, an al-
most regnant power, possibly because he knew that at that
preternatural time hardly any woman so well endowed in
person as she was likely to be walking in the open air within
the boundaries of his horizon; very few in all England. Fair
women are usually asleep at mid-summer dawns. She was
close at hand, and the rest were nowhere.
The mixed, singular, luminous gloom in which they
walked along together to the spot where the cows lay often

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